Among Others I Can't Recall - Tumblr Posts

People who smugly say "nobody has actually ever read Joyce's Ulysses" need to be hit in the face with a copy of Ulysses tbh.

I'm not saying everybody would or should enjoy a deeply weird book about one man's shitty day littered with Edwardian pop culture references mixed with deep considerations on what it means to be an embodied human being in general and also a person from a very specific city at a very specific time. It's not a taste that everybody acquires, and a person from actual Dublin does have a more natural 'in'.

But the reputation of it being uniquely pretentious and difficult, to the point that I often feel compelled to lie when telling others what my favourite novel is just wrecks my fucking head. Is it American anti-intellectualism? Is it British resentment that an Irish person wrote one of the finest novels committed to paper? Is it a defensiveness about feeling stupid because they couldn't get through it (pro tip start at Episode Four, the first three unfairly weed out readers)? I do not know.

I know that it puts people off reading it, though. Which it shouldn't. It's a fantastic book and not as difficult as people say.